Guidelines & privacy

Discuss ideas with care

Ask focused questions, explain your evidence, acknowledge uncertainty and disagree respectfully. Do not impersonate other people, post spam, harass participants or fabricate results. These discussions are general engineering exchanges; follow your organization’s formal procedures for safety decisions.

Keep sensitive information private

Never post passwords, credentials, proprietary designs, restricted facility information, confidential engineering documentation or sensitive personal information. Share only material you have permission to make public. Use Contact for private inquiries.

Moderation

First contributions require approval. Administrators may grant trusted posting after a positive participation history. Edits return to review. Moderators can remove content, pin or lock discussions and review reports. Administrators can restrict abusive accounts. Report a contribution using its Report control, or contact us privately if you cannot sign in. Appeals and removal requests can be sent through Contact.

What we collect

Google verifies your identity. We store your Google subject identifier, chosen public display name, contributions, reactions, account permissions, reports and moderation records. We do not store or publish your email address, Google password or Google access tokens. Your public name and approved contributions are visible to everyone. Pending content and reports are visible to their authors and authorized moderators where appropriate.

Sessions and service providers

An essential, secure, HttpOnly cookie keeps you signed in for up to seven days. Google handles sign-in; Cloudflare and our hosting provider process requests and store community records. Sign-in attempts expire after ten minutes. Rate-limit records use short-lived counters and a salted hash of network addresses for sign-in abuse prevention. Hosting services may maintain their own operational logs. We do not sell community data or add advertising trackers.

Your data

Use My public profile and data to download your profile and contributions, change your display name or delete your account. Deletion removes your Google association, sessions, reactions and contribution text from the active community. A minimal anonymous record may remain to preserve reply relationships and moderation accountability. Backups may retain earlier data until their retention period expires; contact us about a specific deletion or privacy request. If self-service is unavailable, use Contact.

Backup retention

Cloudflare D1 recovery follows the hosting provider’s configured Time Travel retention. Administrators should review that period and any exported backups before enabling posting. No additional exported backup schedule has been configured yet.